I too remember reading about German HSes where students took French besides the obvious English, in my German classes. But much like some Americans take six years of French or Spanish and come out of HS barely able to string two sentences together, many Europeans don't exactly learn all that much from their language classes either. Some degree of fluency in English is close to universal among young people, yeah, but for many people that degree is very limited. For other languages, still more so.

Here in Flanders, what I'm obviously most familiar with, we get two foreign languages besides English - French and German (with actually far more hours of French than English, but still very few students speak better French than English - hard to compete with a language that dominant; the German is rather limited in most cases, extremely limited in some). But that's mandatory only for the more academically oriented part of HS, the others don't have German, and possibly not French and/or English in each year either, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. I would suspect the German system is similar in that regard - French and/or Latin besides English is most likely limited to the more academic types of HSes there.

Getting way off topic here, I think, sorry. Bottom line is what was said above, I think - knowing a language somewhat and acting in it are two very different things. And even those who could do it don't necessarily get the opportunity of doing it.